The Ionothermal Synthesis of Zeolites

Ionothermal synthesis, the use of ionic liquids or eutectic mixtures as both solvent and template in the preparation of zeolites is an area that we have developed over the last couple of years, following our original paper in Nature in 2004. The overall idea is to replace water as the solvent so that the surface of a growing zeolite crystallite is always (or almost always) interacting with the organic template cation and not with a molecular solvent. The method has produced some novel zeolitic materials and has some particular advantages, one of which is that the preparations can take place at ambient pressure because heating up the ionic liquids produces no vapour pressure. This is in contrast to traditional hydrothermal synthesis where the pressure produced is significant and requires extra safety precautions.

At the moment we are developing and extending this new method of synthesis to prepare novel and potentially important materials and to understand the processes occurring in more detail.